


well, that’s a problem, isn’t it

by malevon



Category: Original Work
Genre: Drowning, F/M, Semi-graphic violence, Swearing, Whump, formal apology to maryn I’m sorry dear, itll be Kharis’ turn next time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27380170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malevon/pseuds/malevon
Summary: a fight on deck goes a little awry
Comments: 3
Kudos: 4





	well, that’s a problem, isn’t it

Kharis does not like swimming.

It’s not that he doesn’t know how to, no, not at all. Having been raised in a seaside port town, surrounded by friendly faces that had always taken a moment to slow their step to make sure that he and Aywen weren’t drowning, or caught in a riptide, or being targeted by any sort of malicious port fish had assured that Kharis did, indeed, know how to swim. He had simply taken a few too many unlucky spills off of his father’s boat (falls that did not make any helpful contributions at all to his already-existing hatred for being shipbound) to make him dislike it. 

All of this goes through his mind, quick as a shot, as he happens to see one of the pirates that have boarded Lea’s ship shove the lady in question over the side railing, and then he can only think  _ fuck. _

There’s three of them left — true pirates, Kharis thinks, because despite Lea calling herself a pirate, he had seen enough  _ true _ pirates in the last few months to know that whatever she was doing, she was not a pirate. A thief, sure, but she was certainly not doing some of the things that he had seen and heard about them doing. There’s three of them left, swords drawn, their ship moored next to the  _ Gull _ , and Kharis was maybe starting to get worried. 

He launches forward toward the one closest to him (coincidentally, the one that had just shoved Lea overboard), and the man is still caught up in his victory of overpowering the ship’s captain that he doesn’t anticipate Kharis’ movement, and Kharis is able to slide his dagger neatly in a chink under the man’s heavy leather clothing. 

There’s commotion from behind him. The other two have broken from their trance and their footsteps on the worn wood the deck are much closer to him than Kharis would like. The magic at his fingertips sparks and chills him, but no, no, there’s no need for it, not now.  _ Not yet,  _ it whispers to him, and Kharis disregards it with a  _ swish _ of his dagger behind him, whipping around to face his new attackers. 

They’re  _ fast.  _ Kharis barely dodges out of the way when the quicker of the two, a Taylvin woman taller than he, powers forward and hurls a kick at him, and even then, Kharis still feels the sole of her boot graze his thigh and it’s enough to make him stumble. The other, a shorter Firsandi man, takes advantage of his slippage and delivers his own kick into Kharis’ gut. 

The breath in his lungs leaves him in a deep  _ whoosh _ and it takes all Kharis has not to double over. He grits his teeth, cursing at the two of them, backing up toward the helm to try and give himself some slack. The pair picks up on this immediately and pushes forward. He wouldn’t be gaining any ground any time soon.

_ Fuck. _

His hands are freezing around his dagger. The spot on his side where the man kicked him throbs; the wounds, though minor, from his fight with the other four of them, are starting to weigh him down and make his muscles feel strained and his head pound. 

His hands are freezing around his dagger.

_ Fuck. _

Kharis digs a heel into the deck, the deck that he feels like he has no right to know as well as he does, the deck that belongs to some rich Vridelan that’s doing Sedva-knows-what trying to get his vessel back from some petty thief, and he lets the magic flow through his fingers and spread onto it. 

The ice shatters and crackles in a half-circle on the ground around Kharis; he grits his teeth, bites his lip, listening to the way it sings as it spikes and lurches through the chests of the two pirates before him. He watches as the shock on their faces melts as quickly as the ice inside of them, the crystalline shards staining with pink, slowly, ever slowly. And that’s it.

_ Fuck. _

Satisfied, the magic leaves him be, and Kharis braces against the stair railing leading up to the wheel, huffing. He’s inexperienced, out of practice, and his magic has punished him for his lack of use before.  _ Pain both ways _ , he thinks. He can’t win.

But he has; the ships are still and quiet, the only noises the lapping of the waves beneath them and the dying gasps of the people he’s just killed. Not the first, and certainly not the last. Too still, and too quiet. No obnoxious whoops of victory, no urging to pillage. There is no Lea, not now. 

Kharis takes only one more breath before he goes to the railing, his eyes scanning the wide blue expanse for anything, any sign of her, any sign of the one person who can keep him alive because Sedva knows he doesn’t know how to sail, and without her, he’s as good as the dead bodies littering the  _ Gull.  _

“ _ Calaway! _ ” 

His voice drowns against the beating of the wind, but it carries; Kharis waits a beat, two, before calling out again. Waits a beat. Two. 

His breaths are picking up. It can’t have been that long. She should be surfaced. She should be cursing at him to help her back up into the ship, laughing at the fact that she even let herself be pushed overboard in the first place. “An accident,” she’d call it, and she would make Kharis swear to never tell anyone that she fell out of her own ship — not that Kharis would care to tell anyone, anyway — and he’d agree but laugh along. He wouldn’t let her live it down. 

_ Fuck _ , he thinks, eloquently, taking off his cloak;  _ fuck _ , he thinks, because Kharis did not like swimming.

He vaults over the railing, and the free fall only lasts for a couple of seconds before the water hits him like a hammer. On virtue of being a glacae, Kharis was always cold, the magic flowing through him making warmth a simple impossibility, but the water was  _ cold _ in a way that chilled his damn marrow. He fights to the surface, shaking his hair from his eyes; the sea seems to have a life of its own as the waves slap at his face, but the current could be worse, it could be so much worse, he’s  _ seen _ worse. “ _ Lea! _ ” he cries out again, for good measure, but he knows that she will not answer. That knowledge sets in like a weight, and when it hits the bottom, Kharis takes in as much air as he can and goes down.

Keeping his eyes open under the salty water of the ocean is a challenge, and he strains against his body’s need to keep them closed — the picture he gets is blurry, but he can see the ocean floor several lengths beneath him, and he whips around, searching for anything that even  _ resembles _ her, trying to swallow down the fear that grips him, presses around him, the open water vast and unassuming, empty empty empty until —

A shock of red hair catches his attention, and Kharis can’t stay under any longer. 

He kicks to the surface, gasping in lungfuls of air and trying to regain his composure, panicked words falling from his mouth because — because — his lungs fill with air, as much as he physically can, and he goes under again.

She’s there, slightly to his left and a good ways down, the depth seeming to increase every time Kharis pushes his way through another foot of water. The pressure grows and grows and grows and his lungs are  _ burning _ , and he’s struggling to keep his eyes open, and the rapidly-approaching bottom of the ocean is making his stomach sink and his ears are  _ screaming _ , and then he twists a hand in the fabric of her shirt and ignores the fact that his mind is fading and  _ kicks.  _

He almost doesn’t make it. 

They break the surface after much, much too long beneath it, Kharis heaving and coughing for breath, barely remembering to keep Lea’s head above the water line because she is decidedly not conscious and when Kharis shakes the water from his face, from his eyes, he sees that there’s a short gash at her temple, her face is  _ pale _ and her lips are such an unnatural blue it makes him want to gag. 

Now.

That’s step one.

He didn’t think about how he would get them back onto the ship.

There’s no ropes, and even if there were, Kharis isn’t sure he’d be able to haul the both of them up the several feet of hull and over the railing to get them back into the deck. Even if there were a simple  _ ladder _ he’s not sure he could get them back up there.

His breaths are still coming in wet heaves, and when he looks down at Lea from where he has her situated against his side, he can only think  _ fuck _ .

He has an idea, but it most certainly will not be fun. But. It’s the only thing he can think to do.

Kharis tightens his arm around Lea’s middle ( _ too cold _ ) and closes his eyes, clenching the fist on his other arm and thinking  _ please. Please.  _ “ _ Please. _ ”

And he  _ pulls _ , the magic working its way up from the seafloor beneath them, building and building on itself and Kharis tries to brace himself when he  _ pulls  _ again, wrapping his free arm around Lea, but the ice slams into them harder than he expected — it keeps going, keeps pushing them into the air, cold wind rushing past them. Kharis squints open his eyes and tries to see where the ship is, tries to angle the glacial spire so that it slides them gently back onto the deck, but that’s something he doesn’t think he could do even if he was in  _ full _ control of his magic, even if he was whole and healthy and not carrying a dead body in his arms.

So the magic does not slide them gently back onto the deck.

The best Kharis can manage is an ungrateful spill, the two of them rolling loosely along the worn board, dripping wet and Kharis is  _ shivering _ , he’s so cold, and Lea is, of course, unmoving. That, he thinks, was step two. And now all he has to do is revive the outlaw he was supposed to kill, because if he doesn’t, he’ll drift and drift until he dies because the sea is vast and terrifying and he has  _ no idea how to sail. _

He learned how to do this in his guild training, he tells himself, tries to reassure himself as he rolls Calaway on her back, shaking his head in disbelief, clasping his hands together and putting them over her chest. He bites his lip so hard that he thinks he tastes blood, but it’s the only way he can think to focus. 

“ _ I. Should. Let. You. Die, _ ” the words come, crawling through grit teeth to the rhythm of Kharis’s compressions — he had been told, when he learned this for guild training (he had been so confused at the time, why he had to learn how to revive someone in a job where his express purpose was to kill who he was told; Aywen had cautioned him, said it was a good skill to learn no matter the line of work, but Kharis, young as he was, still hadn’t understood. Kharis isn’t sure that he understands, even now.) that sometimes, when doing this, you could feel someone’s ribs cracking beneath the pressure. He feels it. He feels it as clearly as he feels the frost at his fingertips, something that usually only happens when he’s — when he’s — 

There’s nothing, not for a long time, and Kharis thinks that she’s — that  _ he’s _ as good as dead. 

And then Lea convulses beneath him, trying desperately to get air in her lungs, and Kharis immediately backs away, grabbing one of her shoulders and putting her on her side so the ocean in her lungs can flow  _ out. _

Kharis slumps prone on the deck next to her, and for a solid minute, there’s no noise except for the sound of his exhausted breathing and Lea’s heaving coughs. They sound awful. They sound like they rattle her broken ribs, and Kharis, for all his work, wants to apologize for fracturing her bones, but there’s a weight on his chest that keeps him anchored to the ship. He’s not sure if he can move, right now. 

Eventually, Lea’s coughs do, indeed, stop, and Kharis hears her roll over back onto her back. Her breaths are still wild, wet and uneven, but she’s alive. She’s alive and that’s all Kharis really needed.

“Did you—“ she says, finally, after another moment that feels much too long. Her voice is ragged, rough, a chopping of waves on rocks during a storm. “Did you break my  _ fucking _ ribs?” 

He should be mad. He should be infuriated at her for letting herself get thrown overboard by a nobody pirate who didn’t think any further than the desire to pillage their ship. Her ship.  _ Their ship?  _ He should be angry that he had to jump out of a boat and into freezing cold water and swim down and almost drown himself just so he could yank her to the surface. He should be.

But all he can do is laugh, and it’s a warm thing.

“Yeah,” Kharis says, and brings himself to sit up, turning to look at her. She’s got color in her skin again but her eyes are tired, sunken in and drenched with fatigue. Her hair is still slicked to her forehead. The feather in her hair that Kharis has never seen her without is gone. “Yeah, I broke your ribs. You’re welcome.”

She takes a couple more breaths before answering. Each word sounds like a monumental effort, like because it is; her teeth are chattering now, and Kharis can see the bodily shakes that wrack her. “R’you the reason ‘m  _ freezing _ ?” Kharis furrows his brow. 

“L — Calaway. You  _ drowned.  _ In the  _ ocean. _ ” While he speaks, he reaches over for his cloak, warm from being left in the beaming sun for as long as it was, and intends to simply pass it to her but ends up draping it over her instead. “But I got you.” 

Her eyes look a bit directionless, lacking the sharp edge they usually possess.  _ Still dazed _ , Kharis thinks, and watches her gaze wander listlessly as she tries to piece together what happened on her own.

“W-we were,” she starts again, sounding a little bit more sure of herself. Her voice is slowly coming back to her. “We were fighting. We were fighting, did we win?”

Kharis laughs again. “Yeah, we did.”

“ _ Shit _ , we have to — have to pillage. Get the supplies from the other sh-ship. Make sure there’s no. O-others, we have to —“

“Calaway.”

“Crowe.”

Kharis quirks one side of his mouth. She looks terrible, still salt-soaked and pale and she was  _ dead _ , probably, just a couple minutes ago.

“ _ I _ will go and look at the other ship. Can you stand?”

And Lea, for all of that,  _ laughs _ at him. “No,” she says around that ragged squawk. Sweet and blessed Sedva, he hated it here.

“Alright, come on. Let’s get you to bed.”

“Crowe,” she croons, helping as much as she can while Kharis lifts her up, settling her against his side once more. She’s cold, still, but it’s different this time. A lovely, lively cold. “You haven’t even taken me to dinner in the capital yet.”

“You know what? Maybe I should have just let you drown.”

“ _ Nooo _ ,” Lea whines. Her head slumps against Kharis’ shoulder. It’s a relatively long walk to the captain’s quarters where she sleeps — between stopping to let Lea catch her breath and stopping so he can catch his own, it’s a few minutes before Kharis can situate her in her cot. She’s already half-asleep before her head hits the pillow, still wrapped up in his cloak, and it’s not long before she’s snoring. 

Kharis sighs. He tries not to think too much about the events of the last several minutes. He tries very hard to ignore the urge to go to his own quarters on the other side of the ship to get the spare blankets he’s been hoarding, because even in her sleep Lea is still shivering.

He, ultimately, fails.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I know this is a different flavor from what I’ve been posting but i missed them
> 
> maryn/lea belongs to @potatoavenger on tumblr  
> you can follow me @malevon on tumblr


End file.
